Millions of stars, smears of dust, and even background galaxies pack this image, the first major Milky Way view from the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in northern Chile.
The picture, fittingly dubbed Ocean of Stars, marks the beginning of Rubin’s 10-year Legacy Survey of Space and Time. It’s a preview of what the observatory’s Simonyi Survey Telescope will do over the next decade: snap the same crowded star fields every few nights so astronomers can play one epic game of Spot the Difference.
Together those space images will form a detailed timelapse video of the visible southern sky.
“It’s taken 20 years of hard science, engineering, and more to get to the point where we can call ‘action’ as we start rolling on this blockbuster movie of the universe,” said Phil Marshall, deputy director of Rubin’s operations, in a statement. “Millions of alerts in just the last couple of months show that Rubin is up and running as a discovery machine.”
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